RIM won't show off BlackBerry 10 phones this year
Chief Marketing Officer Frank Boulben tells CNET that Research In Motion will show off more of BlackBerry 10's capabilities, but there will be no big reveal until closer to the launch date. — BlackBerry fans hoping to get a peek …
Context & Ripple Effects
Research In Motion has spent the summer building the case that BlackBerry 10 is real: a hands-on demo of the OS in June, a claim in August that the platform will soon be ready for licensing, and RIM's insistence that carriers love what they've seen so far. What has been missing is hardware on a stage — and CMO Frank Boulben now says that gap is deliberate.
The timing matters because RIM's position is deteriorating around the announcement: its service suffered an outage across Europe, the Middle East and Africa just days before this statement, and reporting earlier in September had BlackBerrys losing shelf space and mindshare with carriers ahead of rival handset launches. The syndication footprint — TechCrunch, the Wall Street Journal, the Guardian and others picking up the no-show decision alongside RIM's fiscal Q2 results, including a $235 million net loss on $2.9 billion in revenue — shows how much weight observers are putting on every signal about the launch.
First-order effects
- Carriers, already reported to be giving BlackBerry less shelf space heading into rival launches, must plan their holiday-season inventory and marketing around BlackBerry 7 handsets with no new-device reveal to anchor it.
- RIM keeps control of the BlackBerry 10 narrative by drip-feeding software capabilities through briefings like Boulben's rather than committing to hardware details months before devices ship.
Second-order effects
- Competing handset makers get the year-end selling season effectively uncontested at the high end of RIM's portfolio, deepening the carrier shelf-space squeeze while BlackBerry 10 remains months from shipping.
- RIM's licensing pitch depends on launch momentum, so withholding the hardware reveal raises the stakes on whatever event eventually debuts the devices — carriers and licensees are being asked to wait on a single moment of proof.
Third-order effects
- If the strategy holds, RIM's turnaround becomes an all-or-nothing platform bet: one concentrated launch event carrying the burden that staggered device announcements would otherwise spread out, a structure that leaves little room for a soft debut.
- The episode illustrates how a smartphone vendor behind on hardware cadence shifts its communications from product reveals to capability teases — a playbook that only works while partners still believe the promised ship date.
The trend: Smartphone turnarounds are consolidating into single make-or-break launch events, with vendors rationing hardware reveals to preserve momentum as carrier mindshare erodes ahead of shipping dates.